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Congressman Morgan Griffith (R-VA) issued the following statement on the release of a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence memo detailing abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA):

“As an attorney who practiced for 28 years in criminal law, I believe the Intelligence Committee memo is of deep concern.

“When the FBI and the Department of Justice make a presentation, particularly to the FISA court, they are supposed to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. On this matter, the memo indicates they did not reveal the whole truth on several occasions to the FISA court. In my opinion, this failure to tell the whole truth quite likely led the FISA court to issue surveillance warrants, which it may not have otherwise done.

“The difficulty is that once such a breach of standards occurs, the entire investigation and the investigative team are tainted. It is a shame that these incidents spelled out in the memo will create a negative impression of the entire FBI and the Department of Justice. It appears that high-level rogue individuals at the FBI tilted the scales of justice for political purposes. Whether they tilted those scales to the Left or to the Right does not matter to me because it is wrong. It is their job to be fair to all Americans.

“This type of chicanery in our justice system must not be accepted. If it is, today it is the Right, tomorrow it will be the Left, and eventually it will be everyone who is denied fair treatment under the law. I invite every American and every resident of the Ninth District to read the memo and ask themselves without concern for political consideration: was it fair for the FBI to not tell the FISA court the whole truth?”